Hey folks! I'm trying to actively get better at pitching developer tools. So I had the idea of collecting an inspiration list of the "best of all time". Would like to crowdsource this!
The vibe I'm going for is pitches that left you with a clear "before" and "after" division in your life where you not only "got it" but also keep referring to it from that point onward.
Obvious candidate for example is DHH's 15 minute Rails demo (and i've been told the Elixir Liveview demo is similar) and Solomon Hykes' Docker demo.
What other pitch is like that? (or successfully pitches a developer tool in a different way, up to your interpretation)
[0]: https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/
It lets the product do the talking. But that’s also the caveat of this demo: it’s typically very difficult to figure out how to engage your audience in such a way with your product, and Twilio being in the mobile space makes that a lot easier.
And that's exactly why I like this demo so much more than even the original iPhone demo.
This was also a pivotal moment in my career, so much good stuff traces back to this five minute demo.
(https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1361279902889086980?s=20&t=A...)
https://dx.tips/pitches
thanks for the suggestion on John Britton's talk!
But it’s also possible I’m just older and more jaded.
I am old now.
Im pretty sure @alexisohanian was there too.
It’s funny, the impact this had internally. It’s like we all believed in what we were doing even more when we felt that magic. I hadn’t watched this again since it happened, still gave me chills.
You can thank me later.
Personally I do not remember ever having the experience you describe, but that’s probably because in my formative years videos mostly didn’t exist yet on the internet, and I learned new tools from reading books, software documentation, forums and blog posts. And once you’ve reached a certain experience level, it becomes much more difficult to get your mind blown by some new tool, because the ideas usually have all been there in some form already, and you also see the limitations and possible drawbacks more quickly.
And the funny thing is, he’s not pitching a tool or even his own specific principles; it’s largely a talk about how you can work toward a cause of your own choosing. But Bret’s principle and the tools he built to demonstrate it are so compelling that they’ve lived in my head rent-free for years.
I've been insanely burnt out by random bullshit at work, wondering why I'm even in this business to begin with, and after watching a few of these it really motivated me, brought back the old memories of wanting to build cool stuff and ideas to solve real problems (a lot of the ideas that I still hold onto), and made me realize that I'm unhappy with work because all I was doing was just people bullshit and bureaucracy bullshit every day, and not actually out there, building stuff; that I just became "yet another white collar worker" and not a hacker and an engineer.
And that has allowed to see what went wrong, and plan for how to get out of this "ditch of boring, stressful politics and human pit".
Seriously, thank you. Without this thread, I would've likely continued to slog on at work without remembering my buried ambitions.
Project: http://lighttable.com/
HN search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The top submission there is the place to start.
Thread in question, from April 13, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978
The submitted link returns 404 but the Internet Archive has snapshots of it. Here is a snapshot from the day after it was submitted. https://web.archive.org/web/20120414175814/http://www.chris-...
The embedded video from the above link does not play for me in the Internet Archive snapshot, but it's still available on https://vimeo.com/40281991
And here is what the Light Table website looked like in 2013 https://web.archive.org/web/20130120114346/http://lighttable...
Submissions about Light Table linking to pages on the Light Table website https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lighttable.com
Pretty much every answer here is a form of, "present a problem that no one thought was solvable, then show the solution you've already built".
i'm interested in how to do that, but with extra added context for those without your context. maybe like a "ghost" view (like how people do in speedrun games) of where you'd be/what you'd have to do without the thing.
Also important is knowing if your tool is early or late in the innovation cycle. If you're early on, then the biggest part of your job is convincing people they have a problem they need solving in the first place (arguably blockchain is in this phase right now, where a lot of what those companies have to do is convince people they are solving a real problem). If you're later on, like Cloud Spanner, people already know they have a problem and will be excited about a solution.
The IB demo has him building an interface without touching code. He goes on to demo a simple app without code. This was in 1989, I'm still waiting for Linux to get close to that.
The EOF demo has him building a CRUD app with queries and joins from IB. Again in 1990. Imagine the original rails tutorial but 15 years earlier. Still waiting on this one too.
If IB had kept up with UIKit/CoreAnimation/Autolayout — or the frameworks had made sure to make IB an integrated part of those features, I’m convinced that SwiftUI wouldn’t exist because there would have been no need.
Close to what? Building an interface without touching code? You could do it for over a decade, at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
the video on the whole is pretty mind boggling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdQt0hF8jOo&t=355
Here's the full talk (which was titled, AWS: We make electricity, so you don't have to): https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6nKfFHuouzA
It was revolutionary. Before that, making a Windows GUI was pretty low level with calls to C APIs and callbacks and registrations.
Visual Basic changed all that with point and drag and drop and you could make a GUI in a matter of minutes.
https://youtu.be/Fh_UDQnboRw